


Stubborn Beast

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Hurt Remus Lupin, I found the last two tags and I had to use them, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, POV Remus Lupin, Past Relationship(s), Post-Sirius Black in Azkaban, Sad Sirius Black, Sirius returns, Starting Over, The Golden Trio Era, they sound like Halloween costume ideas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 18:51:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12754125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Remus Lupin has been going through the motions for twelve years after loss gutted his life from tip to toe in 1981. He hardly expects the quake to his foundations that barrels through the door one night, looking of death and terror with only a glimmer of hope, and he hardly knows how to revisit the past without turning his heart inside out in the process.Standalone—Sirius Returns AU, 1993





	Stubborn Beast

__Such a stubborn beast  
Is best away from the flock;  
You've enough pride for all of us.  
As you wander your island,  
Unborn and unloved,  
You set fire to the bridges  
That you were carried across;

 __But those letters,  
They're all strewn across your bedroom floor—  
Such beautiful words,  
But you just can't remember who they're for…

—Bear’s Den, “Stubborn Beast,” from _Islands_

—

The world stops turning in early September. 

His house in the country is insufferably small, but Remus Lupin is insufferably solitary and would feel drowned in anything larger. This is a fine fact until there’s a knock on the front door just past midnight in the middle of week, not going away when he wills it to through the fog of fleeing sleep and so he’s up—dressing gown on like an afterthought, wand held tight and glowing silver-blue like an echo from the hectic nights of a decade past when interrupted sleep was the norm, bleary blinks as he scrapes at his beard and holds back a yawn. Remus wends through the compact little house in automatic navigation and honestly just wants to pretend the interruption doesn’t exist in the first place.

But he should have known what was coming, as there is a corner of Remus’ mind that has been afire with the contrary since he lost everything; undying coal fire smoldering for twelve years with _He was innocent and you know it, it’s your own damn fault for growing so distant, buy that law book, look into exoneration, innocence, INNOCENCE._ It only makes sense that it flares now, influx of fuel to scorch his advanced processes, charring his brain for several seconds down to nothing but the basal war of Fight Or Flight that keeps him rooted to the spot and dumb with the inability to form speech.

Sirius Black is leaning heavily against the doorjamb, raven hair tangled and lank, unruly beard shot with grey, framed by the half-moon hanging low above the garden and staring at him like he has just raised a corpse.

“I couldn’t think of anywhere else,” Sirius says as the gravel of his voice rattles a thousand dead memories to life in the pits of the places within Remus he has vowed never to revisit. Remus almost shuts the door, but the sheer force of overwhelming disbelief stays his hand. It is several more moments before he can speak. 

“How.”

Sirius seems to catch the purpose of the word immediately—flinty, gnarled, smoky word with stacks of history in its brevity. “Padfoot,” he rasps simply. 

Remus feels the weight of shock threatening on his shoulders, so he takes a step to the side and fastidiously rips his stricken gaze from Sirius’ blazing, clouded grey. His breath draws in hundreds of little claws of glass as he points with a faintly-trembling hand down the side hall on the opposite end of the house from his own room. 

“We’ll talk about this in the morning. Sleep.”

Remus’ professorial tone works as Sirius takes the bidden invitation without another word, moving past Remus into the dark of the house. He stops just a handful of steps beyond the threshold and Remus smells dog and earth and drying rain somewhere in the muddle of his scent. Sirius stares at the floor and flexes his hands absently as he whets his dry lips with a dart of his tongue. 

“I didn’t do it, Moony,” he whispers. His voice nearly breaks around Remus’ old nickname, dead nickname, something Remus never thought he would hear again. Remus swallows the lump of molten slag that rises in his throat with fetid emotion and, despite his reluctance to dredge up the scrap of hopeful truth he’s kept in the moors of his guts, nods. His mind is racing too quickly to hold with any vindication at all to the notion Sirius might still be lying.

“I know. _Sleep.”_ He doesn’t _know_ —he can only feel instinct like sour afterburn and follow it blindly in the dark of confusion.

Something eases at that in Sirius’ shoulders like an iron cable snapped, but he doesn’t look at Remus again before resuming the trek to the hovel of a spare room. Remus watches the retirement like a death march, unable to look away, and remains beside the open front door for several more moments of blank buzzing in the space between his ears. _What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck._

When Remus finally shuts the front door and moves into the bathroom, little white tiles cold beneath his feet and reflection warped in the cloudy medicine cabinet mirror with the blankness of disbelief, he vomits into the toilet until his eyes spring with the tears of effort and his jaw hurts from exertion. He doesn’t weep as he cleans himself up, chucking his fouled toothbrush into the waste bin once he rids his teeth roughly of the sting of bile. He doesn’t cry once he’s back in his bedroom, door shut tight and locked with an extra charm on the handle. He doesn’t let himself feel anything beyond the reaching desperation for sleep to deliver him from this silent and surreal calamity. 

When sleep doesn’t come, Remus does everything he can to block the noise of rioting memories clamoring for purchase on his ragged consciousness. He has walls, dear _Merlin_ he has walls, built up over the last twelve years for proper emotional quarantining—reenforced foundations consisting chiefly of the moldering ranks of death from the war and Sirius’ withdrawal from the life they had started building before he—before it all—

Remus shudders and does his best to banish the thoughts to the tundra of his deepest reserves where they belong, shoving them down with shaking heels of his hands pressed to his eyelids and quick draw of rapid breath.

_Fucking hell,_ he has to teach in the morning. 

There’s a living ghost of the past in his spare room. 

Everything he had resolved to believe in this broken future he doesn’t deserve is going to be dismantled tomorrow, he can feel it. 

But Remus doesn’t cry, and sleep doesn’t come. It stays far away from the invasion of the fractured and bleeding past.

—

The meager early morning sunlight seeps over the windowsill as it always does, but Remus greets it with the abnormal exhaustion of a sleepless night.

He had spent the past six hours alternating between replaying every pertinent memory of Sirius Black’s choices during the war, like flickering photographs, across the backs of his eyes and trying desperately to quell the fires of reignited feelings of anger, fear, and, through the most uncomfortable twists of his stomach, love. All said and done, Remus couldn’t deny the fact that he had loved the man who had inexplicably fallen off the face of his world, snapped, and then landed himself in a cell in the middle of the North Sea for over a decade. But that was the crux of it, wasn’t it; _loved._ Past tense. The man he sent to the spare room last night isn’t the Sirius from before. Couldn’t be. Not after everything he was sure to have dragged himself through to survive long enough, escape, and then find his way here.

They had a lot of hashing-out to do.

Remus swallows the grip of strange vertigo that makes him dizzy as he stands, a wave of nausea that smacks of regret and stale feelings from when he was 20. “Get yourself together, Lupin,” he murmurs under his breath, stalking into the bathroom to run a shower that hisses down scalding hot to paint his scarred limbs like cleansing fire.

Once dressed and crossing briskly to the kitchen, Remus stops for a breath of a moment in front of the closed spare door. He listens for the sound of shuffling sheets, snoring, breathing, anything to tell of the state of the man behind it. Silence answers, and Remus shakes his head at the ridiculousness of worrying so intently. 

It’s halfway through a cup of tea and a charmed-warm stale scone that Remus realizes he needs to leave Sirius alone in the house all day. He weaves a low litany of oaths under his breath but ultimately knows nothing in his tomb of a countryside residence would really be missed if it were somehow razed to the ground. He hasn’t cherished a dwelling since 1979. He tries to ignore the fact that the reason he’s held the memory of that particular flat so dear was that he and Sirius had lived together for a year.

Remus dumps the cold dregs of his tea down the cramped little sink and roots around in a stack of unused parchment by the telephone until he finds one that isn’t scribbled with notes. He tears off a scrap and summons in a quill from his desk across the sitting room with a tight flick of his wand before he scrawls out a note in his quick and angular script;

 _I know we said talk in the morning, but I’m letting you sleep._  
_I have to teach until just after 4:00._  
_There isn’t much food, but eat whatever you need._  
_Water from the tap, tea is in the cabinet above the toaster._  
_Please don’t leave the house, I don’t think it’s safe for you outside._  
_There’s a basement hatch under the rug in my bedroom. Hide there if you think you need to.  
_ _—R_

Remus reads over the message six times, not quite comprehending as his eyes skate back and forth along the words. He clamps down the resistant side of his mind to scratch in a postscript;

_I’m going to need answers if you want to stay here. I don’t have the strength for secrets anymore._

Remus weighs down a corner of the parchment with a saucer and places it in plain sight in the middle of the rickety little kitchen table. Scarf wound tight, out the door into the brisk snarl of autumn wind, Remus locks the bolt tight and hopes wildly that he’s not making a mistake. 

—

“Professor Lupin, what are we doing today?”

A class of sixth years is looking at him varying expressions of expectancy and boredom. Remus doesn’t have anything planned. It was supposed to be counter-charms. He’s been trying to focus all morning but he can’t hold a thought that isn’t _Why is Sirius Black under my roof again,_ so since his first block of class passed in waves of non-progress with him talking in circles and a room full of confused teenagers he’s resorted to handing out sheafs of surprise exams to ‘test retention so far.’ He knows the students hate it. He hates it just as much—testing is the single least helpful thing he can do for them as a professor, but he can’t fucking _think straight._

“Surprise exam,” Remus announces, ignoring the collection of groans from the line of desks at the back of the room. “No marks. I just need to get a read on where we stand as a class.” _Well, that shut them up._ He flicks his wand automatically to float a thick packet of parchment in front of each student. “You have until the end of the hour. You may leave when you’re finished.”

—

“Professor Lupin, do we get to talk about fire crabs again today?”

_If he didn’t kill James and Lily, it was somebody else. Surely. Who else knew they were there besides Peter? If only dead men could talk we’d all be—_

“Professor?”

Remus snaps out of his web of thought and comes to his senses, hunched over his blank desktop in front of his class of first years. The innocence in their expectant little gazes is maddening. 

“I’m sorry, class, I’m not feeling very well today at all,” he says with a note of apprehensive apology. 

“D’you have a cold?” One of the girls in the front row pipes up, ever desperate to be Remus’ favorite. “There’s a cold going ‘round Hufflepuff.”

“Don’t touch the Hufflepuffs, they’ve got plague!” An auburn-headed boy in Slytherin robes jeers from the opposite corner of the room. Remus has worked himself to the end of his rope in his own rampant thoughts, so he doesn’t have the resolve to hold back his unfettered exasperation when he pins the boy with the sort of look he reserves for slacking older students who aren’t prepared for OWLs.

“I do believe, Mr. Henry,” he announces, “that Professor Sprout would be more than pleased to hear that one of the boys who sleeps constantly in her classes has been proving that he failed to pay attention last week and is ignorant of the fact that the cure for all sorts of plague has been discovered and cultivated freely by herbologists worldwide since 1706.”

The boy goes red and is struck silent with embarrassment, and the vein of boyish tendencies that rejoices invisibly within Remus at moments like this, when the class murmurs and shifts with subdued awe at the tongue-lashing of a professor, is silent for his addled preoccupation with whatever awaits him back home.

Sighing heavily, Remus pinches the bridge of his nose and blinks several times to try and wake himself up a bit before standing up from his desk. “Moving along then; I believe we left off with fire crabs.”

—

“Professor Lupin, a word?”

Remus looks up from a stack of essays that he’s forced himself to dive into to keep himself occupied during a free hour when the command of Minerva’s voice lances into his history of obedience. He looks up at her immediately and nearly salutes, so rare are her visits to his classroom without summons or advanced scheduling. 

“Of course, take a seat,” Remus says quickly as he stands up and gestures to the open chair beside his desk. Minerva sits steadily, her innate and feline regality winking out from behind her spectacles as she surveys the classroom benevolently. 

“Have you seen today’s Prophet?” she asks after a moment without preamble, swinging her focus back to Remus. Feeling like a student again, Remus shakes his head with a slight furrow to his brow. 

Remus hates the Daily Prophet and has bodily avoided it since the death of his closest friends was relegated to a postscript on a frontal spread signaling the “end” of their war. “No, is something the matter?”

Minerva purses her lips slightly and reaches into the wide bell of her sleeve with a soft crackle of newspaper. She pulls out the rolled periodical and passes it to Remus, inviting him to unfold the front page with a silent nod. 

Staring hollow and broken out from the full-page headline photograph is Sirius’ face from November 1981, not yet gaunt for his time locked away but already dead behind his eyes for the shattering pain of losing everybody close to him. _And the travesty of wrongful imprisonment,_ hisses the latching little voice at the base of his skull. The sight of it barrels into Remus with such a force of memories revived—morning over tea a dozen years ago, _nearly to the day,_ mug in his hand shattered as he dropped it with the refusal to believe it was Sirius, that it had _ever_ been Sirius—that he flinches, full-bodied and nearly drops the paper now as well. 

“He’s escaped,” Minerva says gently, but not without a touch of ever-curious wonder on the edges of her words. 

Remus works his throat for several tries, not quite able to look away from the subtle movement of the photograph; so still and solemn that a few strands of hair are the only thing eddying with the air of the image. Sirius doesn’t even blink. 

“He’s in my spare room,” Remus chokes out.

“Beg pardon?” Minerva sputters with a tight voice, the blue of her eyes sharp as steel when Remus looks up at her. He feels eleven years old again and afraid of discipline, strangely, for something so far out of his control.

“Last night, midnight,” Remus whispers—doesn’t know why he’s whispering, _perhaps the Ministry put pixies in the eaves, who fucking knows anymore_ —“he said he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

Minerva shifts in her seat, clearly ruffled but not wanting to show it too outwardly at all. “He’s staying inside, I hope.”

“Absolutely,” Remus blurts. He hopes as well.

“I—” Minerva stops before she sighs, a withering sound that makes it’s clear she’s getting too old for this subterfugal nonsense that reeks so strongly of the war. “I don’t want him anywhere _near_ the grounds of this school, do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If Mr. Potter gets wind of this, it could jeopardize his safety as well as his _sense_ of safety in this castle. Not a word to him.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is a secret worth your position on staff and very well possibly your _life_ , Remus, are you prepared to put that on the line for this?”

Remus’ thought process is so scattered and shattered that the only thing he can focus on for a split second is the fact that Minerva called him by his first name for the first time since The Order disbanded. Before he can catch himself, his voice is working for something besides a platitude; “I would bet my position and my life that he’s innocent. I’ve known it from the start.”

Minerva’s eyes flash with some foreign mix of emotions, but Remus recognizes intrigue in the cocktail. “Have you now?”

Remus’ chest swells with unbidden warmth when he nods carefully. “He’s innocent,” he repeats with a softness he supposes is almost entirely for his own reassurance.

“I’ll leave that to you to figure out then. I just wanted to warn you, if you hadn’t heard already,” Minerva says with conclusion as she stands and Remus clamors to follow the motion. She sizes him up genially before nodding to herself. “This makes sense. Albus told me earlier he overheard a student saying you weren’t looking well today. Get home. Get your answers then.” She nods at Remus in farewell, mirrored by his muted scramble to return the pseudo-bow. She sighs lightly once more before she turns with finality to the classroom door—“I hope for all our sakes they’re the ones you want.”

—

Just before two o’clock, Remus opens the front door to a house that isn’t reverberating with emptiness for the first time since he bought the little place with the first advance he received from being hired as the Defense professor.

With incongruous quietude, Sirius is sitting at the kitchen table and poring over the heavy Muggle cookbook that normally sits on the counter, a relic of Remus’ mother that’s never been used but has stood sentinel over the stillness of this part of house since her death seven years ago. Sirius is wearing the spare dressing gown that had gone forgotten in that little dive of a guest bedroom, apparently stripped of the dirtied prison rags he’d arrived in. Remus’ soul shivers at the sight—a gasp of strange normalcy where he least expected it. He wonders distantly if Sirius burned the tattered remnants of his captivity already.

Remus swallows his nerves as he removes his scarf and coat, and Sirius only looks up when Remus crosses into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

“You’re in today’s Prophet, it’s a body call.” Old wartime terminology feels metallic on his tongue, but Remus forces himself to look sideways through his lashes at Sirius watching him evenly.

“I haven’t left the house, I’m staying very quiet.” Sirius’ voice is still rough but now rested, the familiar easy baritone lying somewhere, surely, beneath the layers and layers of disuse and pain. _Stop reminiscing, ask the questions you have to._ Remus finishes making a swift kettle of water and doesn’t look at Sirius again throughout, although he can feel the presence of those distant grey eyes on his back.

Remus pours two mugs of the only bitter black tea he’s got left and sets them, steeping and steaming, on the table as he takes the only other chair across from Sirius. The wood of it creaks faintly while their eyes finally match full-on, canine challenge from only one end of the exchange with Sirius’ gaze still half-dead for exhaustion.

“Tell me,” Remus says with soft intensity. “Everything.”

“It was Pete,” Sirius replies simply, immediately. The clock on the wall beside the refrigerator sings several ticks while the three syllables sink into the air between the two men.

“Pettigrew,” Remus clarifies. He’s holding his breath, doesn’t know if he wanted this part of the story immediately— _but you asked for this, Lupin, are you ready to know for sure then? Do you want this shit on your shoulders?_

“I thought he would have been a better secret keeper. He was insignificant. I figured nobody would think to press him for the truth.” Sirius looks back down at the cookbook open in front of him, unseeing eyes glazed with looking backwards through moldered memories. He turns a page slowly as time attenuates itself to readjust around the truth. “I figured very, very wrong.”

“Why didn’t you fight it then?” Remus finds his voice slightly breathless as it leaves his lungs. “You—the papers _ruined_ you, a whole block of houses and twelve Muggles destroyed, that—it was all Pete then? Didn’t you have an alibi?”

“My alibi was helping James and Lily settle at Godric’s. It still would have looked bad to be the only wizard out alive from that. I was fucked either way from the start.” Sirius is still looking down at the open pages in front of him, so the fricative burst of _fuck_ from his weathered voice makes Remus flinch.

“Albus and Minerva could have helped—”

“Albus and Minerva had a school to run. No use for them to be lawyers when it wouldn’t have helped anyways.”

Remus’ mind scrambles for purchase, as if suggesting alternative choices over a decade ago could heal any of the open wounds slashed across Sirius’ life now. “So you just…let a dozen years of hell happen to you when you knew you were innocent?”

Sirius looks up at him then, a flash of his old self skittering past the light of his irises for the nearest skinning of a second in ferocious determination before fizzling away on the next whisper of the ticking clock behind him. Remus’ chest seizes with the old struts of clinging adoration in an uncomfortable flex of arrested inhalation when the presence fades again.

“In or out of that prison, it would have been hell regardless,” he murmurs faintly. He’s not wrong—two best friends murdered, another dead in crossfire or just as well for a switch to the wrong side, former flatmate and lover gone distant for an inability to communicate the pressure of the wedges that the bloody, sodden war had driven between them. Remus’ breath leaves him in a silent rush before he draws it back slowly laden with a strange mix of guilt and relief.

“Is Pete still out there?” he asks softly.

Sirius seems to notice the tea for the first time and picks it up as though he might shatter it if he moves wrong. He takes a slow, deep sip from it that makes his eyes flutter shut in peace while Remus waits, tense and taut in exact complement, for him to answer.

“If he is, I would rather not know. Because if he is, I’m going to kill him.” Sirius says it so easily that the weight of it almost passes through Remus’ attention like a sieve. Sirius Black is not a murderer, but Sirius Black fears becoming one all the same.

Remus is relieved then, and for what? He’s got confirmation he’s known, deep down, he would never have needed from the start, because he’s always known Sirius better than he knows his own tattered edges—no matter how hard that is to deal with sometimes, especially when he wasn’t even sure if Sirius was still alive as the years muddled into nothing but a smudged passage of time.

_You fucking liar, you would have felt it if he died. You would have offed yourself the very next day, you would have absolutely known—_ Remus grits his teeth and presses his fingernails into one palm to dispel the hard truth of his inner voice. There’s so little to be at peace with these days. He decides to take this reassurance of Sirius’ innocence as a quiet victory, despite the fact the public still very much believes that Sirius deserves worse than a death sentence.

Sirius continues to finish his tea, holding its warmth in both hands and looking down at the cook book with that unchanging, unseeing stare that hints at mountains of inner repair happening slowly in the silent hum of Staying Afloat. Remus forgets to touch his own mug and lets its fading steam winnow in the air between them instead. His thoughts are blank. He isn’t sure if he likes it better than the racing alternative.

Several minutes later, Sirius pulls Remus out of muted inner mulling by setting his empty cup back on the table and closing the cookbook as gingerly as he might have some ancient, holy text.

“Could you help me shave?” he asks, and Remus thinks for a moment that he’s misheard the question. He blinks once to reset his train of thought back onto the tracks of the present.

“Your head?”

“No, the beard. I can’t stand it now that I can hear myself think again.”

_Of course you want to keep the hair long, you insufferable ponce—_ Remus shoulders away the sound of his own voice echoing in his mind like the ghost of their old flat, thick with so much ardor it makes his inner ear ache to hear the memory suddenly, and nods.

“I—yes, come to the bath.” Remus stands and moves into the hallway as he bodily ignores old thoughts of the two of them sharing the massive stretch of the bathtub in the homey little walkup outside of London. He drags a low sitting stool out from the linen closet on his way toward the cramped little box of a bathroom, pulling out a large and threadbare towel as well, and sets it all down just in front of the lip of his own tub.

Sirius walks in soon after, moving as if he doesn’t quite trust his body yet to keep him upright on only two feet. Remus glances up at him as he prepares a lather of shaving cream with his own brush and a shallow little bowl he hasn’t used in a long time—just trimming the beard he’s grown now is a lot less work than a full shave every morning, especially when he hasn’t quite cared after his own appearance through the fog of personal apathy for so long.

“Sit on the lip of the tub,” he says, gesturing with a nod while he digs in the medicine cabinet for his straight razor, “I’ll leave you to shower once I’m done.”

Sirius sits on the porcelain edge, patient while Remus finishes lathering the soap and sharpening the razor with several quick passes across the strop hanging on the wall beside the mirror. Remus shuts the lid of the toilet as a makeshift shelf and sets down the bowl of lather, the razor, and his pair of trimming scissors on a towel before situating himself on the stool in front of Sirius. They sit at eye level; Sirius is slightly taller when they stand but Remus has a longer torso and makes up the seated difference.

“I’ll be quick. Can you—just cinch the dressing gown at your waste, so I don’t get soap or hair on it?” Remus hates the way he can feel the tops of his ears burn with the embarassment inherent in asking Sirius to do anything near the definition of disrobe, but Sirius nods absently as if Remus were merely asking after the weather and slides the fabric off his shoulders to gather it gently just below his ribs. Remus forces himself not to react to the macabre tattoos striated across the pale skin, diverting his attention instead to the task at hand.

Remus tells himself this is a formality, a kindness given to one less fortunate just as he would want to be treated had he also been spat out of the fresh hell of Azkaban and shoved into daily life without any emotional preparation. The scissors hiss through Sirius’ beard like the song of spume on rocks, shorn bits of black and greying hair falling neatly onto the towel Remus has draped across the front of Sirius’ shoulders as if it were the hang of a pauldron cape.

“You’ve noticed the tattoos,” Sirius says gently when Remus finishes trimming the beard as close as he can get it to Sirius’ jaw. Sirius’ voice thrums into the back of Remus’ skull from so near, and Remus twists to set down the scissors and take up the brush and lather in a quiet attempt to shake off the cobwebbing threads of their history he can feel trying to tremble to life in his depths.

“I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about them,” Remus replies as he carefully daubs a white beard of shaving foam over the patchy scruff left on Sirius’ face. Sirius had, in all his years, never kept a beard and hated letting it grow to even a trace of stubble. _This must have driven him mad just as well as the prison itself,_ a more vindictive corner of Remus’ mind sneers before he shuts it down with an iron curtain of self respect.

“I don’t know if they really are tattoos, but I tried to scrub them off in a lake when I first got out and they didn’t go away. It’s definitely some sort of magic,” Sirius explains with a careful, even tone of voice that sounded exactly like his gait had looked on his way in from the hall. “They appeared gradually while I was there, over the first few years. I think the constance of the Dementors does something to your skin, in addition to the despair. The designs going down my chest came first, bled all the way to down to my arms before—”

“You don’t have to explain it,” Remus murmurs fervently, and he realizes he’s gripping the handle of the lather brush so tightly his knuckles have gone white. Sirius blinks once at him like a traveler lost in fog, and while the fog doesn't clear he seems to catalogue the slight furrow in Remus’ brow and the way his shoulders have tensed unconsciously.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius replies as Remus twists to put down the brush and lather and take up the razor and a hand towel. Before Remus sets the razor to his cheek, Sirius meets and holds his gaze with another flicker of something almost chancing at true presence flashing to the surface in that look. “I’ve never meant to upset you.”

Remus clenches hard on his back teeth and just barely keeps back the rebuttal of _Well you’ve already shattered my fucking heart,_ but he manages. He knows he can’t use Sirius as a scapegoat for the frustration that’s been building within him for years, no matter if he truly deserves it or not. Remus is nothing if not fair, and objectively it just wouldn’t be fair—the man has been through worse than Remus can viably imagine, and who knows if he’ll ever be the same for it?

That rogue thought causes an uncomfortable and sudden seize in Remus’ insides, so he swallows it down and leans forward to focus on the pass of the razor over Sirius’ skin. “It’s alright,” he whispers without quite meaning to.

The rest of the shave is blessedly silent, with only the distant hum of the water heater and the gentle scrape of the razor taking up the space between the broken men. Remus keeps himself distracted from dwelling on the darker bits of his conscious thought by following the shapes of Sirius’ jaw and neck with a hawk’s accuracy, seeing the planes of pale skin as an abstraction of Sirius rather than the physical proof of avenues of blood and breath still beating with life—however meagerly. It helps to treat the progression of shaving away the lather as a menial job rather than the tender exchange it feels like in the halls of Remus’ deeper reserves of ignored thoughts.

When Remus draws back to swipe the razor clean for the last time, he unthinkingly and automatically presses the clean hand towel to Sirius’ face to clear away any soap residue. He makes the mistake of meeting Sirius’ eyes instead of keeping his gaze fastidiously trained on the curve of Sirius’ throat as he had been so good to do previously, and he feels a pull inside him at the utter familiarity of the clean-shaven face before him. Endlessly more exhausted, yes, and with shadows beneath his eyes that will perhaps forever betray the fact that Sirius has Seen Too Much, but—this is Sirius Black, this is the boy who saved Remus from himself without even trying; the one who taught Remus that he could be loved and protected and feel like—

Remus feels Sirius flinch under the stroke of his thumb, errant to feel the smooth dampness of the bare hollow of his cheek, and immediately comes back to himself. “I’m sorry,” Remus sputters as he stands, backing up to almost press himself into the closed door, nearly upending the stool. Sirius remains sitting on the edge of the tub and looks slightly lost, touched with purpose beyond the clinical guiding nudges of a shave for the first time in years. _God knows what sort of riot you’ve started in his mind now, good going._ Remus silently fights to keep the fray of emotions from ripping jagged holes in his heart. “I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“I would like to shower now,” Sirius replies, standing up without waiting for Remus to clear out. Remus turns quickly and opens the door to prepare a swift exit.

“Take as long as you need, you can use the towel there on the sink,” he says quickly. He doesn’t look back as he hears the water shudder on to begin hissing down from the shower head, and he pulls the door shut with a solid creak and click of the latch.

Standing alone in the hallway with the muffled sound of baptism by shitty countryside plumbing in the bathroom, Remus hates himself over and over again for slipping up. _This is a hideout for both of you, not some sort of fucking domestic bliss. He’s a wanted escapee and you’re a bloody professor, so act like it, you bastard._ He rakes a hand through his hair and heaves a shaking sigh, staring at the floorboards as if they could swallow him up.

The hardest pill to swallow now isn’t the exhumed past or the bared truths, or even having to deal with the dulled light behind Sirius’ eyes that makes him feel so far away—it all pales now in comparison to the magnitude of realizing that touching Sirius like that still felt like the only home Remus has ever known.

It makes no sense.

It scares the shit out of him.

—

A week passes before Sirius asks after Harry. 

They’ve been existing in a sort of peace like a tension bridge, which Remus isn’t completely sure that Sirius can sense beyond his effort of coming back to himself. Remus treads lightly whenever they’re in the same room together—whether for the baleful tugs of his heart or the distant acid of unease he can never be certain—but Sirius seems to carry on as calmly as ever through the afternoons and evenings when Remus is back from teaching each day. It makes Remus think often and unwillingly, especially as he tries and fails at forcing himself to sleep most nights, on the strange and quiet differences involved with repairing a ruined lifetime.

They share tea and the simple meals Remus cooks as best he can, devoured like ambrosia by Sirius regardless of quality because of course everything must taste like a feast now without a heavy serving of despair alongside each molded plate. Remus hopes, selfishly, that Sirius takes a while to remember he was always the better cook than Remus. Their conversations are simple, often updates on old friends who are still alive or, when drink takes Remus a few steps past sober and Sirius is content to join him in the sitting room, Remember-When stories of those who died fighting. They never laugh, but it’s marginal weight off the shoulders nonetheless.

Through all this shifting, Remus still has not cried. He feels nothing but vague relief. 

Presently, in the slight chill of a Saturday morning that reaches in on spindled fingers through the gaps in the window frames, Sirius emerges from the spare room looking intent. He’s been tying his hair back again and wearing the clothes that remind Remus of his early 20s, all jumpers and jeans stored spare in the closet of the room Sirius is using. It does riotous things to Remus’ memories that he does his best not to show outwardly. 

“Is Harry one of your students?” Sirius asks without an opener, as if the words are black ice and he desperately wants not to skid on them. Remus looks up from the book in his lap with a twist in his guts; he had been waiting for this inevitable line of questioning. 

“Yes,” Remus says neatly. Sirius sits on the divan across from him, the old Kenmare Kestrels jumper almost covering the heels of his hands for its cozy bulk around Sirius’ thin frame. He looks at the carpet, but Remus can see mustered courage like thunderheads storming about behind his pupils. 

“Is he—alright? How does...how has everything—”

“I can’t let you see him yet,” Remus murmurs with a quiver of fierce protectiveness aching between his lungs. Sirius’ jaw flexes and Remus notices his knuckles clench unconsciously; a hound with his hackles rising but not quite enough to bite. His top lip almost curls up over his teeth in defense; Remus sees the muscle there twitch but Sirius stays the instinct. Remus thinks for the first time how difficult it must be to keep Padfoot at bay after spending so long hiding within his skin. 

“I know,” Sirius grates out, his eyes still on the floor. “I just want to know if he’s _alright.”_

Remus closes his book and swallows the rest of the whiskey left in the glass beside him, trying to gather his thoughts on the brilliant boy into some sort of coherence. 

“He’s extremely smart,” Remus says, professorial and matter-of-fact. “He doesn’t always want to put in the work I know he’s capable of, but I suppose that’s what the universe gets when you combine James and Lily.”

It hurts, faintly, to put their names into the air like that, but Sirius doesn’t seem to mind. Remus watches the man for any faltering solidity as he continues; “He has a couple very close friends, and I’ve heard that outside of the class they get on like a house on fire—Arthur’s youngest son, and a Muggle-born witch who’s gotten the highest marks for all three of her years. They’re a good influence.” Remus lets the corner of his mouth twitch up, just a bit. “I try not to favor Harry just because of who he is. I can tell it bothers him when he gets put on pedestals. But it certainly is wonderful to see that same mischief in his eyes, he...” Remus trails off when his throat grips suddenly with the threat of emotions. Harry has always been a weak spot for him. He steels himself down before his eyes can dampen, and he only glances up at Sirius when he’s sure the wave of it has passed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Sirius murmurs. He still looks distant, so Remus lets out an inaudible sigh and pulls a weary hand down his face. 

“It’s alright. You have the right to know about him.”

“Thank you.”

Remus waits in courteous silence for another several beats in case Sirius needs anything else, but the man remains sitting slightly listless and looking exhausted—although worlds healthier from his disrepair even just a week ago. He’s got some color back under his skin, and regular bathing has woken up the angles of his face again. But his eyes are still cloudy with the remnants of desolation, so Remus knows better than to press. 

He picks up the book and attempts to get lost in its pages again, his own sort of escape, but he only reads the same clusters of lines over and over again without retaining them. 

Remus doesn’t wear the weeds of readjusting very well at all. 

—

The first time Sirius laughs, it’s at once beautiful and shattering.

Remus barrels through the front door on a Thursday, still steaming vaguely from a day that’s been too long and far too thankless. The moon is two nights away and itches madly in his veins like lead, which wears his patience thin on its own. But add to it those “Fucking Slytherin whelps,” he snarls as he throws his battered satchel onto his armchair and doesn’t care that a ruff of parchment crunches violently from within. “Same shit they’ve been perpetuating in those families for years, has _nobody_ told them they lost the bloody fucking war?”

Remus shocks a teacup hot with a fizzled bolt from his wand instead of waiting for the kettle to work on its own. He leans heavily on the counter and closes his eyes as he takes a deep, stilling breath.

“Hallo,” Sirius says gently from across the sitting room. He’s reading again, has been reading voraciously for the past four days. Remus doesn’t blame him, and he’s sure the penchant of escaping works similarly on the page as it does in reality. 

“Cheers,” Remus bites out, sense blinded by simmering ire as he slaps a teabag into the poured water. “Say what you will about prison, at least you didn’t have to have to keep eleven-year-olds from hexing each other to pieces.”

The words leave his mouth in a rush, and Remus stays stock-still the second he realizes what he’s said. He turns immediately to face Sirius, see what sort of damage he’s done, and can’t divine any change in the man’s placid disposition before sighing on a billow of release.

“I’m sorry, it’s been a long day, I—”

“Do you remember when we jinxed the dungeon toilets to flush up instead of down?” Sirius cuts him off to ask. The genuine curiosity in his voice catches Remus slightly off-guard, but then Remus feels an ember of camaraderie flickering to life in his ribs that he hasn’t felt in years. 

“Lucius got shit in his hair,” Remus says, taking up the teacup and nudging his satchel off the armchair to take its place across from Sirius instead. 

“I thought Snivellus was going to transfigure me into a turd,” Sirius sallies back, and when his cheeks spasm with the frame of a smile Remus almost drops his tea. It’s fucking gorgeous. 

Remus scrambles for words to keep this jenny of sudden mirth churning between them, feels warmth rising in his cheeks like adrenaline; “LeStrange tried to get us back, remember?”

Sirius chuckles then, tentative and fractured but _Holy Merlin and Jesus and Mary, I have missed you,_ Remus thinks to himself as the jagged melody of it wends through his ears. He’s doing his best to keep his expression reigned and neutral, but he’s sure his eyes are brimming with shocked adoration. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t fucking care, _make him laugh again, keep this going—_

“But James had hexed their parchment to write all their plans on Filch’s wall,” Sirius recalls, his smile wider and his voice freer. Remus is fairly melting to the carpet as he nods furiously, tea forgotten on the table beside his chair as he leans nearer to absorb this joy like sunlight. 

“They were going to put hair loss potion in your food and curse James’ trousers arseless,” Remus says, his own smile twinging on his lips to dredge up flickers of feeling like his old self. He doesn’t hate it at all. 

“Do you remember when we accidentally spelled Pete’s hair blue?” Sirius asks. The shadows have cleared slightly from his eyes. Remus wants to dive into their glittering grey-blue and never come out again. 

“Or when my essay for Charms in year four was somehow made to screech obscenities when it was unrolled?” Remus’ heart swells when Sirius barks out a true spasm of laughter at that, the most characteristic sound from him that Remus has unknowingly ached to hear for far too long. He chuckles along with his own voice’s lighter reed. The warm orange glow of sitting room feel nearer, softer somehow. This is madness. Wonderful, abject madness. 

“I hexed your books stuck shut once when we had just gotten sorted, remember?” Sirius says brightly. 

“I recall that being for the chief reason of ‘that side of the room is mine, Lupin, don’t mix in your Muggle rubbish.’” Remus’ impersonation of Sirius’ old fresh-from-home accent makes Sirius laugh again. 

“Merlin, I was such a fucking tosser, how did we ever get over that?” Sirius wonders through another chuckle. His laughter continues to canter out, but now on the sort of independent cadence that belies underlying preoccupation as Remus watches him with an easy smile, grateful witness to the rarity of it. It’s been so long since he let himself be alone with another person, another man—which makes sense, for even this clouded and addled Sirius is more lovely to Remus than anyone alive could ever hope to be. 

Somehow then in an unfelt twist of the fabric between them, in a moment that passes like a hitched breath, Sirius’s uneven laughter shifts and is no longer catching on itself out of joy. His mouth is the first thing to seize, a bunching of the muscles that pull his lips into a faint grimace—but it’s still beautiful, _fucking hell, how does nature do that to a man—_ while his eyes well up with the red rime of tears. 

Remus’ stomach knots itself tight as “It’s alright,” he says gently, fighting to keep down his own surge of sorrow to see this break like the crack of a faulty glacier. 

“It’s not alright, Remus,” Sirius chokes out through the fresh fall of tears, curling slightly in on himself as, Remus realizes with a swell of ripping empathy, he must have done to try and hide from the sorrow of the Dementors. “I ruined _everything.”_

“That wasn’t all your fault, there was a war—”

_“I_ made the choices; I made _all the wrong choices.”_

Remus clenches his jaw in silence, for what else could he say? That Sirius was blameless? Sirius is being far harder on himself for the crippling residue of years of depressive agony, but saying none of it was his fault would still be a lie.

“You’re here now,” Remus murmurs as he tries to keep his voice even. He’s always been horrible with grief; it’s been the least-impressive cosmic joke of the era to serve him the litany of sorrow he’s been facing through the years.

“Even so,” Sirius weeps, turning his face away and burying himself in the huddle of his knees. Remus watches as his heart tightens with the flex of sympathy. He can only sit mute to absorb it until Sirius shudders with a particularly violent sob and extends a hand, pale and palm-up like some effigy of lilies to an abandoned grave; meek but seeking in anonymity. Remus debates the motion for the thinnest shred of a second before he tosses away the snarling hum of self-denial in the base of his skull and reaches out to take Sirius’ hand in his own.

Sirius’ hand is surprisingly warm—frailer for sure, and more chapped and scarred than the last time they held hands a lifetime ago, _Christ, when was that, some New Year’s Eve?,_ but ever warm with the pulse that runs deep blue beneath the skin of his wrists. Their fingers slot together automatically, careful but brave all the same to grip like anchors on a storming dock.

“You’re here now,” Remus whispers again without quite meaning to, letting Sirius finally free himself from the chains of delayed mourning and the sorrow that had choked him within the walls of Azkaban. Standing sentinel as Sirius sobs, heavy and wracking cries that make his shoulders jump and tremble with exhausted shakes the hand that Remus holds steady, Remus lulls him with the promise of his presence like a stolid lighthouse; flame dimmed and guttering all its own, but desperately trying in the black suffocation of a gale to cast some light into the yawning bay between them.

—

The moon is due to rise two days later, and Remus greets the morning of the opalescent bitch’s arrival with a grim oblation of Wolfsbane.

Severus has been brewing the potion for him since started as a professor five years ago, a measure Albus had lightly suggested to avoid the nuisance of a monthly transformation. Remus trusts Severus’ hand over the cauldron for the main reason that their personal boyhood gripes had faded marginally once Severus had found out about the lycanthropy—perhaps the closest Severus could ever get to something one might call sympathy. Severus had managed to keep the secret down as well instead of vomiting through the hallways like a lesser student might have, so Remus trusts the man a bit further than he would have without cause. However, all the trust in the world can’t make Wolfsbane taste less awful.

Remus has read papers on the volatility of the gnarled black root, perhaps causing all sorts of cancers and adverse reactions in the guts with extended use as a hallucinogenic. Every writeup consistently relegates the “folk use” of Wolfsbane as a repellent for werewolves to a cluster of footnotes. Severus, thankfully, knows how to brew it into something he doesn’t have to smoke, but nothing definitive has been found regarding its ingestion.

The idea of the potion flask in his hand this morning stays his hand for a moment now, for the first time in a long time. Dying ahead of the proverbial schedule has never bothered him in the past—everyone else he cares about is graveyard soil by now anyways, or so he had thought. But now the errant possibility of Sirius having to exist without him makes his hand tense uncomfortably around the neck of the little flagon. The thick, purple gob of liquid within smells of earth and mocking.

“Well you can’t bloody well let a change happen instead,” Remus growls to himself before steeling his nerves and knocking back the monthly draught. It scrapes like cactus spines down his throat and through to the tips of his veins, taking less than ten seconds but painful the entire way. He stands to collect himself in the center of his sparse little bedroom once the searing movement of magic through the liquid stills and leaves him safe for another twenty-eight days.

The fact of safety is necessary and welcome, but Merlin if it doesn’t burn all the way down.

The hours progress as a normal Saturday, and it takes until just before moonrise for Sirius to realize the implication of the evening. He and Remus are reading in the sitting room, fire gone to embers and Sirius wrapped in a heavy volume of old French poetry. Remus tries not to glance up at the picture of placid concentration too often, the way Sirius’ lips barely move around the words he must know like his own fingerprints—a part of him, but unable to trace back their beginnings in his system.

Remus is particularly and accidentally engaged with watching the way Sirius is idly running his lips along a ragged cuticle on his thumb when Sirius suddenly drops his book and looks up like a hound at the point. He dashes to the window, holding fast to the sill that creaks lightly with his touch as he peers outside with canine acuity. Remus’ heart leaps immediately to attention, thinking surely someone, or some _thing,_ has discovered their huddling safety of this countryside and come to drag Sirius back, away; his wand is in his hand before he knows what he’s doing, standing from his chair to—

“There’s a moon tonight,” Sirius breathes as he whirls to face Remus, still gripping to the window frame. Remus is struck still where he stands to take in the full force of Sirius’ eyes, brimming with clarity as in the handful of moments of lucid personality he’s shown through the past fortnight. 

“Yes,” Remus stammers, re-sleeving his wand but not sitting down. Sirius’ eyes tighten and he comes away from the window to stand but three steps away from Remus, his hands flexing and relaxing nervously as had become his unconscious habit lately. 

“Well we—you—you can’t let it happen in here, we have to go outside! We have to run!” He hisses. Remus clenches his jaw and lets a tight sigh escape him. 

“I’ve been taking Wolfsbane for a long time now,” he says gently. Sirius’ expression sharpens from surprise into the serrated edge of slight disbelief. 

“You hate Wolfsbane.” The murmur comes after several moments of frustrated silence like a soft oath to himself, almost the urge of a secret that Sirius doesn’t want to believe he’s airing. 

“I—it’s a potion now, more concentrated. Keeps the whole transformation at bay instead of just dulling it.” Remus doesn’t know why he feels embarrassed to explain himself, but he can feel his temples coloring with the heat of unease. Sirius used to badger him about _Do you even know what the side effects might be? Stop drinking that rubbish, just run with me,_ when he would brew it into tea in their old flat, always worrying, always—

“It’s also poisonous,” Sirius snarls, “unless that’s changed as well in a decade.” His stare is bright and exacting, which almost hurts to look at directly. Remus stomachs the pain it causes in the bed of his sternum and glares right back. Fine. If Sirius is present but wants to waste the precious scrap of time to argue, they’ll bloody fucking argue.

“I had to figure out how manage the moons on my own,” he says, voice low and tremulous despite his push to keep it flat, “even before everything fell apart. When you went off, to—to mire yourself in all that fucking secrecy, I had nobody left to help.”

“That didn’t give you the go-ahead to _poison yourself—”_

_“And what gave you the go-ahead to leave!”_ Remus’ yell takes him by just as much surprise as Sirius mirrors, the bolt of rage igniting between them a flash just behind the silvery vigor in Sirius’ gaze. Silence thrums between them for a moment of recollecting themselves. 

“I was trying to protect you,” Sirius finally says, his voice a low and territorial growl.

“I’ve been left alone for _twelve. Years,”_ Remus seethes back. “What part of that says ‘protection’ to you?”

Something that shimmers in a flash of hurt makes Sirius’ eyes gather slightly at their corners. “Keeping you far away from me was the only thing I could think to do.”

“You could have told me so.”

“That would have ruined the point of secrecy.”

“Well what good is secrecy if our friends are dead and I thought you were too!” Remus snaps as if his words are the wolf, and he knows he’s hit an artery in Sirius’ resolve when he sees the man’s expression falter with the unique stutter of revelation. “I thought you were dead,” Remus repeats plainly, without half the bite. 

“Remus—”

_“Don’t.”_ Remus holds up a hand, suddenly tired of ire and sadness as he drops his stare to the carpet. “It’s all past. No use clawing it back up now.”

“But I never wanted to—” Sirius stops himself, and Remus doesn’t have look back up at him to picture perfectly the slight knit of his brow when he sniffs a vindictive sigh to himself.“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all past,” Remus says again, as if just saying it could make the strain of...whatever they are now hurt any less. He sits back down in the armchair as Sirius has a visibly inward debate on whether to push the point or retire it again. His decision ends with a growl under his breath, the whuff of Padfoot-wrought frustration, as he looks once more to meet Remus’ eyes in fraught and riotous apology before rounding on his heel and shutting himself solidly in the spare room. 

Remus tries to quiet his heart and fails miserably.

—

Sirius’ cleared disposition has stuck for another week, and Remus is silently hopeful that it means he’s back for good.

Their argument over the moon seemed to have struck some sort of flint back to life in Sirius’ body, reawakened the last necessary edge of his being to pull him back to the land of the living—Remus tries not to feel a twill of blackened pride that his resolve was fierce enough to revive a soul fairly fresh from Azkaban. Regardless, their rapport had come back to square one the morning after the moon with the unspoken truce of a shared pot of tea. 

This unseasonably warm afternoon, amidst a thicker-than-normal bed of birdsong, Remus rounds up the front walk and tries to keep his thoughts away from the feeling of peace that’s been invading the rhythm of his days at home with Sirius. _This is refuge,_ he has to keep reminding himself, _this is not anything close to comfort. You do_ not _belong to each other anymore._ As ever, Remus ignores the ripping tug at his soul that wracks him whenever he brings that fact to the front of his mind. He shuts down the the pain to swing open the front door. 

The uncharacteristic quiet of the place hits him with a force that wouldn’t have mattered before Sirius had arrived. 

Remus’ heart is suddenly in his mouth as his pulse threatens terror and he drops his satchel just inside the doorway to make an immediate circuit through the house. Kitchen, empty. Sitting room, empty. Bathroom and his own bedroom, empty. _Fortuna, you bloody harridan, if you’ve ripped him away again I will burn this world to the fucking ground—_

He pushes open the door to the spare room, the place he’s avoided to allow some semblance of privacy for Sirius and his own fear of breaching the past, and tamps down his fear to see Sirius quietly sitting on the floor. Relief floods Remus’ veins just before being replaced by a fresh sort of alarm to see that Sirius has discovered a heavy sheaf of letters in the old desk pushed against his south wall.

Sirius looks up at the sound of Remus’ entry, the look of being caught doing something surreptitious completely absent for the overwhelming air of desperation in his disposition. He holds a fold of parchment in his hand, with tens of others lying open around him as if he had read through them with the fevered rush of discovery.

“You never sent these,” he says fervently as Remus’ eyes rake wildly across the tableaux. Remus remembers with a delayed drop of his stomach that he had shoved a ream of years’-worth of unsent letters to Sirius into the bottom drawer of that old drafting table in an effort to forget they had existed—he had never had the courage to burn them outright. 

“I’ve read six collective years of letters from you, Remus, you never sent these,” Sirius repeats, his voice insistent and just barely trembling with urgency.

“To where would I have addressed them?” Remus posits hollowly, desperately not wanting to rehash the argument of Sirius’ flight and arrest but nonetheless feeling the tug of purpose in his guts. “They were therapy. I had no other outlet.”

“They’re beautiful,” Sirius says softly, a quality of his voice that Remus hasn’t heard since the last gauzy morning abed they had spent together sometime far too long ago. It strikes Remus to his marrow, but he quells the tremor of affection—squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head like a horse tossing its mane to rid him of the blackflies of ardent memories. 

“They’re ridiculous. I was—depressed, and lonely, I was writing to a ghost.”

Sirius doesn’t seem to hear the denial in Remus’ voice and continues to pore over the page in his hand, reading aloud as Remus’s guts churn with the warring waters of adoration and panic; “ _‘I thought of you this morning when I left the flat to see the touch of ice on the eaves shining as it melted around itself—it reminded me of the way your eyes used to glitter when I called you mine and this home was ours…‘_ Remus, I never meant to—”

“But you did,” Remus blurts, his breath coming quickly as he looks fully down at Sirius now, feeling unsteady with his coat still half-drawn across his shoulders as he stands in the doorway for his haste to solve the quietude in the house. Remus doesn’t know what to do with this revealed truth now besides face it now head-on. “I don’t care what it is you ‘never meant to’—scare me, love me, let it go so far, whatever it might have been, but you _did._ I thought you had—fuck, I knew you were innocent, but the racketeering that went on about you killing our—your brother, he was your _brother,_ he—James was your _brother.”_ Remus pauses to catch his breath and can’t hold back the question that’s been fighting at the back of his teeth since Sirius arrived. “Why didn’t you make me your secret keeper?”

“Because they would have known it was you,” Sirius answers immediately, softly. 

“How would they have known!” Remus cries out with a breathless toss of humorless laughter, his eyebrows canting together with the utter ridiculousness of it all as he silently begs Sirius to serve him some sense for once in a world that makes none. “We were living in a hovel in a Muggle town, there was no way—”

“Because they knew that I loved you!” Sirius stands up with his own exclamation, the letter crimping between his fingers with unconscious force. Remus’ heart stutters in his esophagus and he tries to swallow it down; fails, fails, _fails._ “They would have hurt you, I couldn’t let that happen—”

“Well good fucking job avoiding that!” Remus suddenly shouts, doesn’t _want_ to be shouting but his resolve is so weakened by the press of reality that he can’t hold it in anymore. “I loved you more than _anything_ and you ripped that away from me! You tried to do the right thing and—you were braver than I ever could have been and it—it destroyed you!” Remus gestures widely, perhaps to fling off the invisible webbing of oppressive and aimless yearning that’s been gripping him for far too long. “I wanted to keep you safe and you had to—you were doing so much more for them than I knew and—“ Remus stops for a moment when he feels his eyes prickling madly with tears for the first time in years, and he so badly misses the feeling that he can’t fight them off any longer. He gasps for air around his thoughts before the final burst of candor comes tripping out of him unbidden on the hiccup of his first sob; “I couldn’t fucking save any of you, Sirius…!”

Survivor’s guilt crashes through Remus like a storm then, the first time he’s uttered Sirius’ name in twelve years rolling from his tongue like the release of sails to the wind. This is what he had been holding back; the bezoar of compacted dread stunting his emotions like a plug since mourning his losses in 1981 and moving on from then with perfunctory necessity to survive. He hadn’t known it had seared so deep, capped off his nerves with the cauterization of isolation and ruined him so deeply. Had Sirius not come to pull him up from the depths, haggard and pale but _alive—_ as Remus begins to cry, he doesn’t want to think anymore. He only wants to let himself go. 

Remus weeps in racking sobs amid the sprawl of letters at his feet and Sirius gathers him into an embrace that is, if he’s finally being honest with himself, the only thing he’s ever truly wanted since coming home to an empty flat one evening with nothing but a note on the table— _Remus: It will be alright. I have loved you to the stars and back._

As Remus cries to cleanse himself of the stolid press of anguish, its waves thick and rolling like the churn of the Baltic but not nearly so cold, the last yet-unruined pane of his heart aches sweetly to know that at least one of those stars has finally made the return journey.

—

It has been another month, and Remus has given up the Wolfsbane for good. 

_We have the entire Forbidden Forest and Padfoot needs a run as well,_ Sirius had said carefully, almost a request three days ago in the stillness of breakfast while the clouds were busy blotting out the sun. _And I hate watching you drink that shit._

He assumes the run was good because he isn’t broken or bleeding anywhere and his lungs fill now in waking with the pins-and-needles of well-earned afterburn. It must have been a necessary bout of release for Sirius too—flying through the night and tearing across earth that isn’t Remus’ floorboards for once—because they two of them are wrapped up in exhausted repose, still marginally clothed and muddied on top of the covers of Remus’ bed, like they used to do in the Shrieking Shack. Remus silences the groggy memories of their early fervent kisses and later urgent frotting to slough off the rest of the adrenaline on the half-broken bed in that shithole. He trades recollection for the present in a pattern he finds Sirius has been causing in him lately.

Remus catalogues the sleeping austerity of Sirius’ face as he leads himself into wakeful attention. The aging happening there is much more etched-in by grief and torture, the likes of which he constantly stays himself from imagining, but it still has happened with such inherent grace that, in the right light, it almost looks like nature’s doing instead of catastrophe’s. Remus looks at Sirius’ mouth parted in the peace of heavy sleep and again mutes a memory of kissing. They haven’t broached that hallowed point yet, but Remus figures that will come with time as Sirius slowly returns to himself. To kiss him will be the final bastion of coming alive again, but he knows in his bones it still might be a far-away promise. For now and perhaps always, Remus is content to lay beside Sirius and share the cocoon of their body heat like nested refuge.

As the world awakes beyond the garden gate, Remus lets his heart stir with old and unfettered love for the first time in twelve years. For all his misgivings, the souvenirs of the stubborn and reclusive beast he’s allowed the world to turn him into, he knows he needs this. They have always needed each other—stars and moon, as much as Remus hates the metaphor sometimes. He can’t ignore the truth when it’s here beside him, breathing steadily in the peace of exhaustion, smelling of safety and an all-too-brief cluster of years when everything felt beautiful.

Remus lets himself believe that for once, maybe they can truly run from death and build the future he used to promise himself in the quiet and lonely hollows of his dreams. 

After all and down to his deepest inner reaches, Remus Lupin has and always will love Sirius Black more than life itself.

To the stars and back.

 

_—fin—_

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write a Sirius Returns AU, unattached from the Basingstoke series of course but still inspired by it, and I finally found the perfect combination of a good song to back it and some motivation to put it together! It was different writing from Remus' POV since I identify much more strongly with the way Sirius feels and processes things, but I liked the journey a lot. The distance of several years between here and when I'm used to writing them was also a really enjoyable challenge, such jaded and aged boys they are. Thank so much for reading! You all are the best <3


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